July 2016

07/08/2016

Celebrating its 10-year anniversary nationally this month, the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) returns to UCLA Anderson July 9–17 for the ninth consecutive year. EBV was launched at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management in 2007. Since the original class, the Institute for Veterans and Military Families has expanded the EBV Program to 10 world-class universities throughout the U.S.

More than 80 veterans with disabilities will converge on the UCLA, Texas A&M and Syracuse University campuses in July to leverage the valued skills gained from military service and learn the basics of business ownership. The Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University (IVMF) and nine other EBV consortium schools across the country deliver the EBV Program to post-9/11 veterans with service-connected disabilities, who desire to develop the skills and tools needed to launch and maintain successful businesses. Assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration, corporate partners and donors allows participants to attend the EBV program cost-free.

Applied Management Research Team 12 comprises Class of 2016 MBAs Elias Rangel, Kelly McKenzie, Sean Keegan, Jenna Gu and Ronnie Wise. We come from diverse backgrounds, both in terms of geography as well as industry, but none of us had previously traveled to Africa. In fact, it was the only continent (other than Antarctica) that we had not traveled to, and we were very excited to become immersed through our work with our client, BeadforLife.

BeadforLife is a nonprofit organization based in Kampala, Uganda, that helps raise extremely poor women out of poverty through business education. Originally, BeadforLife worked by training women to make jewelry from paper beads. It purchased those beads from the women and sold the final jewelry to customers in the U.S. and other Western countries. BeadforLife then trained these women in the two-year-long Beads to Business program, teaching them business fundamentals, so that they could eventually “graduate” from bead making into running their own businesses.

BeadforLife has begun a new venture called the Street Business School, which works to consolidate the learning from the two-year training into a six-month program that focuses exclusively on training to increase levels of self-efficiency and income. Our assignment was to help BeadforLife in their expansion efforts, specifically around social franchising.

We’re gratified to report that that BeadforLife implemented most of our recommendations and are launching the SBS Global Expansion now, using an adapted version of our framework.

Team 12 member Kelly McKenzie was fortunate enough to travel on both the team’s African trips, first to Kampala and then to Accra, Ghana, for the Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights:

Kampala, Uganda

Sean, Elias and I traveled to Uganda last November. I recall that on the drive from the airport in Entebbe to Kampala we kept exclaiming how green and gorgeous this country was — a lush tropical wonderland full of noise and colors.

After a few hours, we made our way to the apartment that we would be calling home for the next few days — the so-called “BeadforLife Resort” — where we met with our client representative, the multi-talented Carlyla Dawson.

We spent our first full day in the country on a whirling tour of sights, smells, tastes and sounds that are all uniquely Kampala. From Hindu temples, the largest Mosque in sub-Saharan Africa, a Bahia temple, Idi Amin’s former palace, markets, car parks that functioned as public transit hubs, and the Lake Victoria fish market. We saw it all.